Department of Biomedical Engineering, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran.
Comput Intell Neurosci. 2022 Sep 29;2022:6318916. doi: 10.1155/2022/6318916. eCollection 2022.
Assessment of attention is of great importance as one of human cognitive abilities. Although neuropsychological tests have been developed and used to evaluate the ability to pay attention, their validity and reliability have been reduced due to some limitations such as the presence of intervention factors, including human factors, limited range of languages, and cultural influences. Therefore, direct outputs of the brain system, represented by event-related potentials (ERPs), and the analysis of its function in cognitive activities have become very important as a complementary tool to assess various types of attention. This research tries to assess 4 types of attention including sustained, alternative, selective, and divided, using an integrated visual-auditory test and brain signals simultaneously. Thus, the electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded using 19 channels, and the integrated visual and auditory (IVA-AE) test was simultaneously performed on twenty-eight healthy volunteers including 22 male and 6 female subjects with the average age of 27 ± 5.3 years. Then ERPs related to auditory and visual stimuli with synchronous averaging technique were extracted. A topographic brain mapping (topo-map) was plotted for each frame of stimulation. Next, an optical flow method was implemented on different topo-maps to obtain motion vectors from one map to another. After obtaining the overall brain graph of an individual, some features were extracted and used as measures of local and global connectivity. The extracted features were consequently evaluated along with the parameters of the IVA test by support vector machine regression (SVM-R). The volume of attention was then quantified by combining the IVA parameters. Ultimately, estimation accuracy of each type of attention including focused attention (86.1%), sustained attention (83.4%), selective attention (80.9%), and divided attention (79.9%) was obtained. According to the present study, there is a significant relationship between response control and attention indicators of the IVA test as well as ERP brain signals.
注意评估作为人类认知能力之一非常重要。尽管神经心理学测试已经被开发并用于评估注意力能力，但其有效性和可靠性由于干预因素的存在而降低，这些因素包括人为因素、语言范围有限以及文化影响等。因此，大脑系统的直接输出，以事件相关电位 (ERP) 为代表，以及对其在认知活动中的功能的分析，已成为评估各种类型注意力的重要补充工具。本研究试图使用综合视听测试和脑信号同时评估 4 种注意力，包括持续性注意力、交替性注意力、选择性注意力和分散性注意力。因此，使用 19 个通道记录脑电图 (EEG) 数据，并对 28 名健康志愿者（包括 22 名男性和 6 名女性）同时进行综合视听（IVA-AE）测试，平均年龄为 27±5.3 岁。然后，使用同步平均技术提取与听觉和视觉刺激相关的 ERP。为每个刺激帧绘制拓扑脑图（topo-map）。接下来，在不同的 topo-maps 上实现光流方法，以获得从一个地图到另一个地图的运动向量。获得个体的整体大脑图后，提取一些特征并用作局部和全局连接性的度量。随后，通过支持向量机回归（SVM-R）将提取的特征与 IVA 测试的参数一起进行评估。最后，通过组合 IVA 参数来量化注意力的量。最终，获得了包括集中注意力（86.1%）、持续性注意力（83.4%）、选择性注意力（80.9%）和分散性注意力（79.9%）在内的每种注意力类型的估计准确性。根据本研究，IVA 测试的反应控制与注意力指标以及 ERP 脑信号之间存在显著关系。
